Month: January 2012

Our friends at Last.fm just donated a 48 port gig switch to MusicBrainz! This new (to us) switch will allow us to shorten the update cycle for our indexed searches. Currently it takes about 3 hours to generate the indexes and to push them out to the search servers. With this new switch, we should be able to push the indexes quite a bit faster, which should shave off 60-90 minutes off our update cycle.

Thanks so much for the donation! Thanks to Adrian for making this happen in next to no time!

Yesterday we held our mini-summit in London to great success. The MusicBrainz team huddled up in a hotel last night and finished writing up notes of everything we covered, and you can now have a look at them on the wiki at MusicBrainz Summit/2012-Mini_Summit/Notes. In general, we provided an update of what’s been happening at MusicBrainz, what’s coming up in the future, and heard how each company are using MusicBrainz. Discussions have started with respect to classical support, but don’t expect anything concrete any time soon!

Many thanks to everyone who came along to this summit and helped make it work – it was great seeing you all!

While the summit is open to people who have registered ahead of time, the pub gathering will be open to anyone who would like to join in. We’re not going to have any formal topics scheduled for the gathering — just a friendly gathering of like minded souls and of course, beer!

We’ve just pushed out the last MusicBrainz web server update out for this month. Here are the bugs we’ve squashed, and the new features and improvements that have been added. As always, keep helping out with scheduling at the scheduling game, and we’ll do our best to get the important things fixed as soon as we can! Thanks to Ian McEwan, Lukáš Lalinský, Calvin Walton, Johannes Weißl and the MusicBrainz developers for their work on this update.

In conjunction with Lukas I’ve been working on a complete rewrite of libmusicbrainz to support the new Web Service v2 released alongside NGS. I’m happy to announce the official release of this new library (libmusicbrainz4).

The library is written as a relatively simple parser for the results from the Web Service, with as little logic as possible. This should mean it is easy to maintain to keep in step with any changes in the schema for the XML Web Service.

The main interface is a C++ class ‘CQuery’, that returns a Metadata object containing a parsed version of the response. There is also a C interface that loosely wraps the C++ classes.

We made some changes to our database connection routines recently, and the replication scripts were not correctly migrated. We’ve got these changes in now though, so to fix this problem, repeat the instructions in our previous post, but use the v-2012-01-12-schema-change-2 tag. This should correspond to commit eb89c2b51f79..., which you can verify by running git rev-parse HEAD.